The Universal Design Award is an international design prize presented by the Hanover-based award-giving body Universal Design GmbH. The standards used to choose the annual winners include objective and intuitive product usability by a large number of people, product or service reliability, safety, distinctiveness, and innovation. The Raku-raku smartphone – literally the easy-to-use smartphone – seems to tick all the boxes for the award. Fujitsu launched the Raku-Raku Smartphone in the midst of a global smartphone war between Samsung and Apple, but went on to find a niche market that the major smartphone players have not specifically addressed. They launched a phone that caters to senior users, and offers usability, simplicity, ease of viewing, and dependability that was progressively cultivated in next models of the Raku-Raku Phone series. These features serve as the core concept behind the product, and it is not surprising that the company is now being recognized for an innovative design as well as astute marketing.

Universal Design praised the Raku-Raku Smartphone its unique features, like the Raku-Raku Touchscreen, which helped a lot of elderly users perform basic smartphone operations by offering innovative use of haptics – a very tactile sensation of pressing physical buttons. The phone’s distinctive menus also garnered praise, having been designed for greater ease of use. The screen layouts and graphic user interface can also be intuitively navigated to enable access to desired features at a glance. Moving forward, Fujitsu announced that it is planning to release a new smartphone based on the Raku-Raku structure, tentatively called the STYLISTIC S01. This phone model will be available through France Telecom-Orange in France starting June 2013. The company said that users can expect the new smartphone to employ the same, if not better, user-friendly concepts that made the Raku-Raku Smartphone a hit.

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This is why I keep saying out loud to all Interior Designers in Canada and Ontario – you can have FUNCTIONAL DESIGN which is the domain of ergonomic/human factors & Universal Design WITH beautiful FORM. Stop fearing FUNCTION and lets all get together and work for the common good of the CLIENT! JE Sleeth Owner & Sr Consultant OPC

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